Often, I think I know China well. However, just as often, it occurs to me that I don't really know what I thought I knew. The visions and experiences collected and stored in my mind while I am awake are gone after I have slept. Reasoning and understanding seem to last only for a few hours before becoming illusory: the images and meanings disappear one by one, stolen from me by apparitions and secreted away, never to be returned in their original form. The understandings that I have assiduously acquired are nothing more than banal when bound together to try and shape the oldest continuous civilization on earth. Experience, learning and proudly possessed knowledge, gained from many sources and from interaction with its people, are taken from everyone who thinks they know China and passed on to others who share them smugly, use them with confidence, reverently broadcast them as Gospel for a few praiseworthy moments. "I know China." Then, time and circumstance mangle them until they are beyond comprehension. These too will be passed on and shared as truth, only to be proved wrong again. The enigma is this: China never changes, but China is always changing. Its people beset by burden, affected with melancholy, inured to bewilderment, and suckled on uninterrupted millennia of incalculable hopelessness and sorrow. "There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better", said Mao Zedong. This is the real truth: "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese" - Charles De Gaulle. China: don't ask, it is what it is...

Better to war-war than to jaw-jaw, to stand Winston Churchill's remark on its head. The United States Senate and the trade unions are not alone in believing that we have been jaw-jawing with China for too many years, while it continues to take jobs from America by manipulating its currency, stealing our intellectual property, and subsidizing exports of solar panels and other bits of green technology so as to strangle the U.S. green industry in its cradle.

The Democratic controlled senate, with 12 Republicans joining 50 Democrats, passed by a vote of 62 to 38 what it calls the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act to impose tariffs on Chinese goods unless the regime allows the yuan to appreciate faster, perhaps by somewhere between 15 percent and 40 percent. U.S. companies that have been competitively disadvantaged by China's currency manipulation can treat "misaligned" currencies as a form of subsidy, and apply for tariff protection. This bill, in the unlikely event that it passes the House—Speaker John Boehner calls it "dangerous"—would result in a flood of complaints by China to the World Trade Organization. American companies would almost certainly lose, and animosity towards the WTO and by extension other international organizations would rise. But those supporters of the bill who keep their dog-eared copies of The Wealth of Nations handy can at least claim to be acting in the great tradition of Adam Smith, who wrote that "when some foreign nation restrains ... the importation of some of our manufactures ... Revenge ... naturally dictates retaliation, and that we should impose the like duties and prohibitions upon the importation of some or all of their manufactures into ours."